By joining and participating in groups relevant to your target market, and answering questions relevant to your industry, you can immediately position yourself as an expert in your space. Furthermore, you will also get direct access to these other professionals as prospects!

We have put together a series of videos to show you how to:

Join a Group in LinkedIn

Videos on how to use LinkedIn Groups and Answers

Participating in Groups on LinkedIn is a great way to gain access to a larger network of professionals and, in doing so, creating more prospecting opportunities.

You are allowed to join 50 groups on LinkedIn and should absolutely take advantage of the ability to join all 50. If you don’t, you are reducing the opportunities for awareness, exposure, and business.

Create a Group in LinkedIn
If there is not already a group for your target industry, or even your company, you can create your own! Owning a group allows you to moderate the content and create excuses for contacting group members.

Note, people will leave groups if all they receive is advertising, so be sure to provide primarily valuable information to your group members, in addition to a little information about your company from time to time.

Create a Sub-Group in LinkedIn
Sub Groups on LinkedIn are a great way to increase the engagement and communication between existing group members.

Ideas for Sub Groups include sub groups for events you are holding, different products your company offers, or different industries your company services.

Get started with LinkedIn Answers
LinkedIn Answers is a simple yet powerful way to stay up to date and what professionals in your target market are talking about, as well as a great way for you to position yourself as an expert in your space as a source of information.

LinkedIn Answers are basically questions that other professionals are asking the LinkedIn network, categorized by topic. If someone is asking a question that is relevant to your line of work, this is a wonderful opportunity to connect with a prospect!

How to create your profile.
The first steps to leveraging LinkedIn for your business is creating your own professional profile. This tutorial video walks you through the first steps of how to get your profile started.

Make sure to fully complete your profile! A complete profile brings with it increased Google indexing as well as increased awareness on the LinkedIn network of over 75 million professionals as of the time of this article.

How to mass connect to your database
As soon as you have created a profile on LinkedIn, your number one goal is to connect with as many people as possible. This video shows you how to connect with your entire database on LinkedIn. LinkedIn even shows you if a contact is already on LinkedIn.

If you have a contact who is already on LinkedIn, and you are not connected with them, you are doing yourself a disservice because it means that other people are connected with them!

How to integrate your blog into your LinkedIn profile.
One goal when using LinkedIn is to generate business. A great way to do that is to incorporate your company’s blog onto your LinkedIn profile to create another opportunity for the viewers of your profile learn what your company does and also view the newest updates.

If you have a company blog, you should do everything you can to generate as much traffic to the blog as possible. Why spend time writing a blog if nobody reads it?